Welcome to the Fishing Report. It is 50 degrees in Townsend, Tennessee this morning. It is foggy of course and dew is dripping from the trees like rain. I encountered quite a bit of traffic on the way to work. People are active. Animals and birds are very active too. Last night when I got home our field was full of wild turkeys. I saw at least 20. This morning when I drove out of the driveway there were more just standing in front of my truck. Squirrels were all over the place in town gathering nuts and hopping around. A red tail hawk was perched on a power line next to our parking lot. If fish are acting like mammals and birds, this should be an excellent day for angling.

Little River looks good. The water flow is almost exactly normal at 74 cubic feet per second. Median flow for this date is 69 cfs. The water temperature is 56 degrees right now. It will warm up some later. The high today is supposed to be 85 degrees. It will cool down later in the week and we may get some rain on Wednesday.

Fishing should be really good. I heard some reports this weekend that were encouraging. Others said the fishing was slow. I talked to one guy who seemed to be doing everything right but he got skunked on the Middle Prong. I had days like that when I first started fishing here decades ago. There were a lot of fishermen on the rivers and slow fishing may indicate that someone had been in the water shortly before you.

You can use nymphs or dry flies. When conditions are this good, either will work. The water is low as it should be this time of year. The trout are hiding in riffles and under cover during the day. Catching them in pools would be nearly impossible for me. The choppy water is where they will be unless they happen to be a brown trout looking for mates and a place to spawn.

Here is an interesting story on the Knox News website. TWRA is stocking mussels in the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. You should read it by CLICKING HERE. Hydroelectric dams have impacted the mussel population. Some species are threatened and endangered. The populations are declining at an alarming rate.

When I was a kid and teenager I practically lived on the Kentucky River. I remember walking out on the front of my parents houseboat when we were tied up at Boonesborough Beach at night. That was before it became a State Park. If I shinned a flashlight in the water there were big mussels everywhere. When I got my own boat in my early teens, me and friends would camp on the river for several nights in a row. We could lock through at various dams and travel over 100 miles from Boonesborough camping along the way. Now the locks are closed. There is talk about building a larger dam and raising the river pool to provide more drinking water for Lexington. I have longed for years that they would remove those dams and locks allowing the Kentucky River to revert back to it’s historic status as a free flowing stream. Large boats would be replaced by canoes. I’ll never see that happen. What a shame.

One thing I really like about fishing in the ocean is it is practically the same as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. By “the same” I mean water levels. Pollution is certainly different now. It exists.

Below is an e-mail I got from Powell. I’m going to leave it on the Fishing Report for a while.

Have a great day and thank you for being here with us.

Byron Begley
October 11, 2010

Please vote yes on right to hunt and fish

Subject: FW: Hunting/fishing issue on the November ballot

We need to spread the word on this, it is one of the issues that people will scratch their heads about when they go to vote because they have not heard a about it. Please send this to everyone on your email list of voters...

On November 2, 2010 we will go to the polls to elect a new governor in Tennessee . On that same ballot will be the right to vote for an Amendment to the Tennessee Constitution allowing for the right of Tennesseans to hunt and fish. Even though we have been hunting and fishing in Tennessee as long as I have been alive, it is not a guaranteed right. With the amendment, it will make it much more difficult for anti hunting and fishing folks to challenge the right. In the last election for a Tennessee Governor, 1,900,000 votes were cast. In order to pass the amendment fifty (50%) plus one votes must be cast as a YES vote. If this election follows the pattern of the last election, we will need 950,001 votes. There are not enough registered voters who hunt and fish to pass this amendment by ourselves. Therefore, we need to make sure our spouses and our friends know to vote YES for the Amendment to the state constitution.

I have talked to several folks about this and they have said "but we already have the right to hunt and fish". Yes we do but the animal rights folks (PETA) are very well funded and they are passionate about stopping hunting and fishing. If we stand by and do nothing, there very well may come a day when we no longer have these rights. Fourteen states have already passed an amendment to hunt and fish. Tennessee , Arkansas and South Carolina will vote for the amendment in November.Please, don't take your rights for granted. Send this email to everyone who believes we should have the right to hunt and fish. If you want to know more about this issue, go to the Tennessee Wildlife Federation Web site at www.tnwf.org to get more information.